Grace prided herself on keeping her cool—a vital skill in a profession where she might have to deal with anything from a ripped fingernail to cardiac arrest. But all the athletic tape in the world couldn’t fix stupid.
“Everybody gets shin splints,” the junior varsity basketball coach raged. “You are letting Andie milk this to get out of conditioning.”
And you need to be smacked upside the head with your own clipboard. Bad enough that they’d called a Saturday morning practice, screwing up Grace’s plans. Now she had to deal with an idiot who wouldn’t be satisfied until she saw visible damage on a bone scan. It was Grace’s job to be sure Andie’s condition didn’t progress to that point, and with the power vested in her by the school district, the athletic trainer’s word was final.
But whenever possible she preferred to rule by reason, not force. “Andie’s pain is caused by her horrible foot alignment. I am going to continue to restrict her activity until she has been fitted for orthotics and then eases back into practice.”
“You’re talking weeks! The basketball season will practically be over.”
Grace made a suitably grave face. “You’re right. I can’t guarantee she’ll be able to make a significant contribution to the team this year.”
But she would be healthy enough to have a shot at repeating her top-ten finish at the previous spring’s state track meet in the eight hundred meters, along with anchoring a bronze-medal-winning two-mile relay team.
“What am I supposed to do?” The coach slapped her clipboard down on the nearest padded treatment table, temptingly close to Grace’s reach. “She’ll be dead weight, but her parents will raise hell if I cut her.”
No doubt. Her mother had been an all-conference forward at West Texas A&M and was convinced her baby should follow in her hoop-shooting footsteps even though Andie had barely made the junior varsity squad.
Grace heaved an exaggerated sigh. “I could try to talk to them.”
“Would you?” The coach leapt at the bait like a nylon-clad sucker. “They’ll take it a lot better coming from you.”
Grace made a show of sighing again, careful not to overplay it. “I’ll do what I can.”
“Thank you!” The coach snatched up the clipboard and charged out before Grace changed her mind.
The door had barely swung shut when it was pushed open again and a head poked inside. “Is everyone gone?” Andie whispered.
Grace leaned back in her chair and smiled. “The coast is clear.”
“Did it work?”
“Like a charm.”
“Thank God!” Andie hobbled across the room and threw herself onto a treatment table with a level of drama only a fifteen-year-old could muster. “And thank you, Miz Mac. I know I’m being a total wuss, but I just can’t look Coach in the eye and tell her I don’t want to take any chance that playing basketball will mess up my track season.”
Ditto for her parents, but in cases like this, Grace didn’t mind running interference. As the middle child of seven, Grace had played the fall guy for her younger brothers often enough that she had it down to an art.
“Tell your parents to call me this evening.” She waved a shooing hand. “And get out of here so I can, too.”
She paused to swap her nylon sweats, polo, and running shoes for jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt, a sweatshirt, and boots, checking the time as she hustled across the empty gym and out the back door to the teachers’ parking lot. Only nine fifteen, with the rest of a rare Saturday off to spend however she wished—which meant she would be roping.
First, though, she headed toward Earnest, the southeast point of a rough triangle that was around twenty miles on each side and ten miles across the bottom, with Bluegrass at the apex and Dumas on the southwest corner. The Jacobs ranch was ten miles on south of Earnest, so they’d probably be done working bulls by the time she got there. Grace had promised to help, not that she was good for much beyond filling vaccine syringes. She’d made herself a roper, but she was still no ranch girl.
What Earnest lacked in size, it was determined to make up for in holiday cheer. A few years back the Chamber of Commerce had designated their little town the Cowboy Capital of the Panhandle, then had set about proving it. As a result, grinning scarecrow cowboys twirled ropes, hefted branding irons, and galloped straw horses through clusters of pumpkins and cornstalks on every street corner and in every store window. Overhead, multiple strands of Christmas lights already crisscrossed Main Street, with a big, twinkling sheriff’s star at the center of each swag and four-foot-tall elves brandishing six-shooters and tipping cowboy hats at the top of every streetlight.
As she rolled through town, Grace caught herself searching for a battered maroon-and-white Chevy pickup—slouched in front of the Smoke Shack or pulled up to the pump at the Kwicky Mart. Silly, to get anxious as Thanksgiving crept closer. Hank was far, far away, and given the state of affairs in the Brookman family, he wouldn’t come waltzing home expecting turkey with all the fixin’s. Last time he’d barely made it past the billboard at the edge of town. She glanced at it in her rearview mirror, though she knew the lettering by heart.
WELCOME TO EARNEST
Home of
Delon Sanchez, 2x World Champion Bareback Rider
Gil Sanchez, ProRodeo Rookie of the Year
Melanie Brookman, National Intercollegiate Champion Breakaway Roper
Jacobs Livestock, Texas Circuit Stock Contractor of the Year
If Hank had continued as he’d started, his name would be next on the list. Hank Brookman, National Finals Bullfighter. Or the ultimate honor—ProRodeo Bullfighter of the Year.
But without the discipline or maturity to match his talent, she supposed his meltdown had been inevitable. And Grace had gotten caught in the fallout…the worst and the best thing that had ever happened to her.
When she’d scuttled out of Texas, there hadn’t been a single person outside her family who’d missed her. Even within their church she hadn’t had any real friends, and her lunches with Hank were the only contact she’d had with the cowboys and cowgirls she’d admired from afar. Now she knew everyone on that billboard personally—thanks, inadvertently, to Hank.
Raindrops spattered her windshield as she accelerated onto the rural road. Normally she would have been cursing the lousy weather, but now that she got to rope in Tori Sanchez’s indoor arena over in Dumas, it was just an annoyance. That arena, along with the barn and pasture where Grace boarded her horse, was the reason she’d rented an apartment in Dumas. Living close to her horse was well worth the short commute to work.
All in all, life had been treating her pretty damn good since she’d moved back to the Panhandle.
She was turning into Cole and Shawnee’s driveway when her phone chirped, so she stopped to check the text message. Alarm zinged up her spine at the sender’s name, before she even read the words.
He’s ba-ack.
Grace closed her eyes and swore. So much for assumptions. It seemed Hank had decided to come home and spread some holiday cheer after all.